A sideways look at Ukraine war news

Russian state TV is not for the faint-hearted

Chris Johns

I write a (short) daily post for Powerscourt, a Strategic Communications company, based in London and Dublin. The idea is to summarise the news flow around the war in Ukraine - not so much the news that makes the front pages but more the stuff that we find interesting/relevant. News that may have not attracted the attention it deserves. Anyone interested in receiving the short email on a daily basis is welcome to contact Powerscourt here: insights@powerscourt-group.com.

Tuesday May 30th

Various Ukrainian politicians and military officials have been dropping hints about the role played by recently supplied US Patriot defence systems in repelling multiple Russian attacks. President Zelenskiy referred to a “100% interception rate” provided by the Patriots in his most recent nightly address. Other Ukrainian sources admitted that several aircraft have been damaged in an attack on a an airfield in the West of Ukriane. 

Unconfirmed reports this morning suggest someone has attacked Moscow with several drones. Sky news quotes Andrei Vorobyov, governor of the Moscow region, who said that air defences dealt with most of the drones. Other officials have admitted that a small number of buildings were hit by drones that did get through. RIA, Russia’s state news agency, reported that at least one residential block in Moscow had been evacuated.

Russian missile attacks on Kyiv and other targets have never been more intense and have, for the first time, included daylight raids. Obvious questions should be asked about earlier claims by some Western analysts that Russia was close to running out of missiles. Maybe they are getting even closer. The strategy behind the attacks is not obvious. Analysts posit a link with the Ukrainian counter offensive (upcoming or started already, according to different theories). Putin might be trying to break civilian morale in order to force Ukraine to the negotiating table. Or he might just be making a mistake by focussing mostly on anything other than military targets, a strategy that might actually stand a chance of producing results.

An aide to Zelenskiy has dropped a hint about possible about peace terms, the first such occurrence in a very long time. On a social media post, Zelenskiy aide Mykhailo Podolyak called for any post-war settlement to include a demilitarised zone of up to 120km inside Russia to protect his country from future "aggression". The Russian regions of Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and Rostov were included in the desired demilitarised list to be included in any “post-war settlement”. 

Wednesday May 31st

Russian forces have seemingly given up on any proactive measures and are now merely responding to Ukrainian ‘shaping’ operations wherever they occur. The UK’s Ministry of Defence reports that Russian commander’s options are made even more limited by the need to occupy Bakhmut nit that Wagner forces are staging a withdrawal. The need to establish reserves in order to send them wherever a Ukrainian attack occurs is also constraining Russian capabilities. Yevgeny Prighozin, Wagner’s boss, joined a chorus of commentators berating the Kremlin for not mounting a full scale mobilisation. Without this, Putin’s options remain limited. Prighozin has been keen to express his fealty to Putin, and normally criticises the Kremlin. His comments about the need for mass conscription come very close to Putin’s door. The Institute for Study of War stated that Putin’s downplaying of the drone attacks on Moscow was a result of his limited options for retaliation. That said, Kyiv has now been attacked 17 times this month by missiles and drones.

James Cleverly, the U.K. Foreign Secretary struck a very different note compared to the US response to the drone attacks on Moscow. America merely repeated the mantra that it does not support any Ukrainian cross-border action while Cleverly said “Legitimate military targets beyond its own border are part of Ukraine’s self-defense”. He qualified that remark by saying he wasn’t commenting on the most recent incidents.

The US debt ceiling deal currently lumbering through Congress won’t affect US aid for Ukraine, according to the White House. An unidentified official told Bloomberg that extra cash for Kyiv will be subject to supplemental Congressional approval and will not be tied to any cap on Federal spending.

Oil prices have fallen again, notwithstanding OPEC’s resent agreement with Russia to cut production. Latest data suggest that the Kremlin has not honoured its promise to join in OPEC’s output curbs.

Thursday June 1st

Watching Russian state TV is not for the faint-hearted. Julia Davis, creator of The Russia Media Monitor provides an invaluable translation service on various platforms. And has been sanctioned by Russia as a result. Vladimir Solovyov hosts a nightly chat show, interviewing the likes of Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, a news channel that used to have a significant presence in London and many other countries around the world. Solovyov and his guests regularly call for Putin to use nuclear weapons against Western capital cities. Their euphemism for the total destruction of Ukraine is a repeated demand for Kyiv and many other cities and towns to be ‘dismantled’.

Despite Solovyov requests for guests - and Russia’s citizens -  to remain calm, the tone of his show is growing more hysterical. A State Duma member this week suggested another guest be shot for his views. Other guests recently called for the assassination of US Senator Lindsay Graham, following the broadcast in Russia of highly edited - to the point of complete distortion - remarks by the prominent U.S. politician. Simonyan suggested that assassinating Graham ‘wouldn’t be hard, we have his address’. Other guests pointed out that such an operation on US soil would be ‘hard’ and that a better approach would be to target any Western pundit that ‘insults Russia’. 

The UK’s Ministry of Defence today joins the small group of Western Russia media watchers. In their daily intelligence briefing the MoD notes the limitations on freedom of speech introduced by Putin since the start of the war. Despite these restrictions, some people are still speaking up. The MoD speculates that the recent vitriolic rhetoric of Wagner’s boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, has emboldened one or two other opponents of Putin. Russian opposition politician Boris Nadezdhin recently appeared on state TV and called for a new President to be elected in next year’s scheduled elections. That’s a most unlikely outcome of what will be a rigged electoral process, but to hear such words on a Kremlin approved TV station is extremely unusual. 

Friday June 2nd

Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Brett Stephens wrote a piece for the New York Times about ‘broken windows policing’. That’s a theory, supported by lots of data, about crime: if you stop policing the petty stuff, serious crime will get worse as a result. Stephens took this idea and applied it to world affairs. He predicted that because nobody stood up to Putin’s repeated ‘minor’ infractions around the word, there would one day soon be a big one. Stephens thought the likeliest candidate was a Kremlin takeover of Latvia. That he guessed the wrong country doesn’t diminish the quality of the analysis or reduce its relevance today. He also predicted big trouble ahead  if nobody does anything about China’s ‘petty crimes’. 

Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University, takes Stephens idea and applies it to Asian thinking about Ukraine. Unlike in the US or Europe, there are few, if any, serious suggestions of war fatigue in Japan, S. Korea or Taiwan. There, says Brands, they totally subscribe to ‘broken windows policing’ and believe that the outcome of the war will, eventually, land on their doorstep. The global order on which they all depend will be enhanced or diminished by the outcome of the war. “Ukraine’s survival is Taiwan’s survival,” Taiwan’s top diplomatic official in Washington, Hsiao Bi-khim, argues. “Ukraine’s success is Taiwan’s success.” 

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg columnist, describes recent Ukrainian attacks on various targets in Russia itself as a two-edged sword. They force the Kremlin to divert resources but risk civilian casualties. A group of men drove through a thinly defended part of the border in the Belgorod region, planted a flag on top of a social club and then went home. The drones hitting Moscow got through because they flew low and switched off their GPS systems.

When Russia first engaged with Chechnya back in the 1990s, few Russians supported war. But when Chechen groups started blowing up targets in Russia, attitudes hardened. Putin was accused of staging some of those explosions - the classic ‘false flag’. As soon as opinion polls showed support for war, Putin flattened Grozny.